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Thursday, March 13, 2014

Planning your own website begins with content planning

There is a lot of
material written about website design and layout. However, the most important
component of a successful website is the content. Content planning is perhaps
the most important step. Wefind that
few of our clients spend the time to do that before they sit down in front of
our template system to create the pages. Failure to think through website
content is the primary reason that most of our clients never actually launch
their “vision”.

The first step is
to write a sentence or two that describes the overall goal of your website. You
should keep coming back to this as you move through the process as that will
help you stay focused on that goal. If you revise the goal as you create the
site, go back and re-write that goal statement to retrain your focus.As an example, the goal of all of the
articles of our blog is “Helping the technically challenged with their online
presence.”

The next step is
to create an outline of the content your want to place at the website which
will achieve that goal. Go back over that several times and keep organizing and
focusing that content in the outline. Now start to think of each section of the
outline as a separate website page with each page having a single focus. Over
time, you may create more and more content to help you achieve that overall
goal of the website. However, for the initial launch, think about only what’s
essential to achieve the goal. Over time, you can add more pages to the web site.

Now that you have
a web page content structure, use a word processor program such as Microsoft
Word to actually write the copy. Don’t worry about the layout of the page; just
write the copy. Once you have the copy, now start to think about images which
will help you express the copy. Your first source for images should be photos
that you took on your own camera. If you cannot find the right image, there are
a number of online sources that sell you the rights to use images on your
website for a couple of dollars each. I’m sure that some of you will be tempted
to “borrow” images that you find on the Internet. I assure you that’s a really
a bad idea. There are services such as Getty Images that have very
sophisticated programs to catch anyone using their images. If you’re caught,
you’ll receive a letter from their attorney explaining that you either pay them
a lot for the past use of the image or face consequences. Click here to read our blog post about, how to properly format your photos for the Internet.

Now that you have
the images and the copy together, you can start to look at various page layouts
to display that. Almost all of your will use templates to drop in your photos
and copy. That will be a lot easier than building pages from scratch.

We find that people
who plan their content, write their copy in a word processing program and gather
the photos before they start to actually place that information on a web page,
can build a website very quickly. Those who don’t plan may never get the
website launched. This should be a fun process with an outcome that will please
you. We’re confident that when you plan, you’ll be happy with the end result.